The calm ended, however, when my grades started to slip. I had a tough schedule of advanced classes. For the first time in my life the answers didn’t come easily to me, and I brought home a failing grade in calculus. My parents bore down hard on my lack of performance, and the more they scrutinized me, the worse I functioned. To make matters worse, whether it was from hormones or stress, my face broke out terribly, also for the first time in my life. My perfect complexion and my high GPA were both lost, and my parents accused me of being on drugs.
Giti was still the only friend I talked to about my home life, and the only teacher I spoke with about it was the band teacher, Mr. Casagrande. One day I skipped school, lied to Mr. Casagrande about it, and got caught. He was extremely disappointed in me and quick to explain just how much I’d let him down. When he confronted me about the lie, he pointed to a blue stripe painted on the wall. “Do you see this?” he asked. “If you told me this stripe was green, I’d believe you. I would doubt my own perception because of the faith I have in you.”
Mr. C. and I had grown very close over the past four years. Until now, I could not remember having disappointed someone I respected. I felt a trust from him that I had never felt from my parents. It was too much for me to take. Ashamed, I broke down. “I’m so sorry,” I cried. “I’m just not thinking straight.” I accepted responsibility for what I had done. I also told him about some of the stress I was feeling at home, but I only touched the surface. And, remarkably, he forgave me—another first for me. His attitude was You’re a good kid. You’re a teenager and you’ve done something stupid. Wise up. Don’t lie to me again. But what I heard through his reprimand, which I was most grateful for, was the sentiment: And of course I love you anyway.
Several months later, I teared up when I saw what he wrote in a letter of recommendation for me to his alma mater, Ithaca College: One of the biggest compliments I can give Carine is that she’s someone you would want your own daughter to emulate.
The contrast between Mr. Casagrande and my parents was hard not to see. I returned home from school one day, and when I opened the door to my room, it was trashed. My closet and all my drawers had been emptied, the contents piled high in the center of my room. Atop the pile were all my prized music accolades and drum major trophies, broken into pieces. I was devastated. Mom said she’d had to go through my room like that in order to find where I was hiding my drugs. Of course she found nothing.
One week after my high school graduation, I returned home from a date with not a minute to spare before my eleven P.M. curfew. I knew my father was sleeping in Annandale that night, and I unlocked the door quietly, hoping to delay until morning the questions about where I’d been and what I’d been doing.
Before I finished turning the key, the knob suddenly lurched out of my hand, jerking me forward as the door swung open. My father, angry eyes on fire, reeked of gin. I recognized his contempt, aimed as much at himself as at me. He had been needing this release. At that moment, he saw me as just my mother’s daughter.
My feet crossed over the threshold without touching it, my sandals falling to the floor as he lifted me by the neck and shoulders, repeatedly slamming me against the wall. A deep, fierce roar escaped him as he threw me onto the couch and trapped me under his weight.
“You don’t do this anymore, Dad, remember? Stop!” I pleaded. “You don’t want to do this. You were doing so well. Stop!”
He closed his hands around my throat to silence me. “This is your fault!” he accused. “Look at what you’re making me do!”
“No! Don’t!” I begged between breaths. “Please stop this, Dad!” I wrestled one arm from under his knee and began to strike him in the face. But it didn’t faze him. He just stared straight at me and tightened his grip. I saw the coldness in his eyes and a panic over his loss of control, and it terrified me. He brought his face down close to mine. I could feel his heated breath and taste the foulness of the alcohol.
“You think you’re all grown up now?” he seethed. “You think you’re in control now?”
I jerked and freed one knee to kick him in the groin.
“You fucking bitch!” he screamed.
As his grip released, I placed both my feet onto his chest and launched him to the other end of the couch. I ran up the steps to my room and barricaded the door with every piece of furniture I could muster. Then I grabbed the phone and retreated into my closet, slamming the door on the cord trailing behind me. It did not even occur to me to call the police. I wish it had. Instead, I called my mom at the Maryland beach house.
“Hello?”
“Mom! Help me!” It was hard to talk through my syncopated breathing as I told her what had happened. As soon as my father picked up another receiver, I knew my words were unnecessary. She could easily recognize the tone of his defenses after a drunken rage.
“She’s lying, Billie!” he claimed. “It was all her fault! She came home late! I didn’t do anything wrong!”
I exhaled and waited for her to reply to his intoxicated nonsense.
“You know what, Carine? I think you’re a lying bitch” was all she said before hanging up.
I stared at the phone in disbelief until the dial tone became rhythmic and snapped me into understanding. Admitting he had done that to me meant accepting he would do that again to her. She couldn’t allow that reality.
I threw the worthless phone onto the floor and wept for a few minutes. Then I took several deep breaths, picked myself up, and walked to my bed to look out the window. Too far to jump down. I walked into the center of my room, stared at the blockade mess at my door, and screamed through it, “You stay the fuck away from me!”
The house was silent the rest of the night. I awoke in the morning to a knock at my bedroom door and my mother’s voice. “Carine. Get yourself cleaned up and come downstairs.” I walked down the steps to see my mother and father sitting at the dining room table. Her expression was void of any emotion. Dad played the wounded innocent, a pattern long ago established as guilt.
Mom instructed me to pack my things. “You’ll need to quit your job,” she said, “because you’re moving to Windward Key to stay with me. Your father will not be allowed over.”
I turned to him and said, “I will never forgive you for this. As far as I’m concerned, you are no longer my father.” He looked back at me, his eyes wide with hurt as if I were being cruel.
As soon as I arrived in Windward Key, my mom took away my driver’s license and removed the phone from my room. In less than a week, my dad was coming and going from the beach house freely. My parents told me never to speak about what had happened. They continued to live, work, and act as if nothing had. Clearly they were not the problem, so the problem must have been me.
In a last-ditch effort to “set me straight,” my parents took me to see a psychiatrist. I sat in the backseat of our deluxe Fleetwood, staring at kids in other cars on the highway and wondering about the better places they were headed to with their parents as mine droned on about how this doctor was of an elite status, brilliant, recommended by one of their most affluent business associates. This doctor was very expensive, and I had better appreciate what they were sacrificing, both monetarily and in social status, to get me this appointment. I had disgraced the family yet again.
Dr. Ray’s first approach was to seat us all in his office together. I sat quietly and listened to my parents tell their tales of family dysfunction, brought on by the reckless behavior of some wild, drug-addled teenage girl who had my same name but whom I had never met. I stared at my parents blankly as I listened to their charges.
Then Dr. Ray spoke to each of us privately for about fifteen minutes. I was first. As I wasn’t the one writing the big check, I assumed he wouldn’t believe anything I said in my own defense. His questions were prudent and tactical. I didn’t concede to his careful query about any violence in the house. He asked me about my parents’ accusations of drug use.
I’d known my turn would come one day. Anytime
one of the kids rebelled against Walt and Billie’s behavior, my parents first defaulted to “It’s drugs! You’re doing drugs. That’s why you’re acting like this!” Now it was my turn—I was the one sitting in the crazy seat.
“I’ve never used drugs,” I told Dr. Ray. “I’ve never smoked pot or even a cigarette. Hell, I’ve never had a cup of coffee. Lots of Pepsi, though. And I did get pretty tipsy on grain punch, twice.”
He wasn’t amused. “Tell me, why do you think your parents brought you here?”
I shrugged, then launched into the first thing to come into my head. “My mother used to brag about my beautiful peaches and cream complexion,” I began, “and as you can see, it’s not an accurate description lately. She’s completely embarrassed that my face is like this. Did you happen to notice what hers looks like?”
He raised his brows and nodded for me to continue.
“So she takes me to the doctor to take a drug test. Dr. Hanfling tells my mom that he doesn’t think I’m using drugs. And he would know—I have to see him for sports physicals all the time. ‘Billie, she’s a teenager,’ he says. ‘Sometimes teenagers get acne. It’s a terrible thing for them to go through, especially the girls. We can try some medicated lotions, or . . .’ ‘But look at her face!’ she cuts him off. She wasn’t interested in any explanation other than her own. He looks back at her like she’s nuts and then, real carefully, he says, ‘It can also be an inherited condition.’ Well, that really pissed her off. I thought her head was going to pop right then and there and land beside me on the examination table! So, I jump right up and say, ‘Just give me a cup to pee in. I’ve got nothing to hide.’”
“And?” Dr. Ray prompted.
“And a week later I’m putting on my makeup, trying to cover this up.” I made a circle in the air around my face. “And just like one of those freakish clown scenes in the movies, her face appears in the mirror, and I jump up and around to see her standing there with a sheet of paper held up high in her left hand, and she’s breathing like a bull in the ring, looking like she wants to kill me. ‘How’d you do it?’ she shrieks at me. ‘Do what?’ ‘How’d you pass the drug test? I know you’re using! Your face is swollen!’ I just rolled my eyes and told her I thought she was crazy. That didn’t really help the situation, but lately I don’t know what else to do but laugh about it.”
Dr. Ray dismissed me to the waiting room and brought my parents in one at a time for their own quarter hour. I was surprised when he asked to speak to me in private again. He leaned back in his chair as I sat on the other side of his desk. He had one ankle up on his knee and was forming a rectangle with his hands and a pencil. He looked straight at me over the rim of his glasses and said, “Well, your parents are really fucked up.”
The words of Chris’s letter came back to me: . . . it is useless to try to explain them to anybody, because they will never believe you. . . . They [will] think that you simply couldn’t handle the normal conflicts which all teenagers and their parents go through. I’d always figured that was the case, too. But now here was Dr. Ray, believing me.
He invited my parents in to sit on either side of me, and he explained the same sentiment to them, but in a more medical manner that would not preclude his being paid. He then suggested that they each come in once a week for counseling.
As I watched the strangers in the cars beside us on the highway ride home and listened to my parents carry on, I could not contain my laughter as they degraded the prestigious doctor to a worthless quack.
Meanwhile, his last private words of advice echoed in my head again and again: “Get out of there as soon as you can.”
That was already my plan.
CHAPTER 5
THE SUMMER BREEZE OFF Chesapeake Bay was comforting as I carried my bags down the tall town house staircase and loaded them into my boyfriend Patrick’s car. It was midnight, July 19, 1989. My eighteenth birthday. Liberation had finally arrived. My parents could no longer force me to remain locked up in their expensive cage, and I could taste freedom in the salty air.
Patrick squeezed my knee reassuringly as I sat down in the passenger seat. I’d met John Patrick Jaimeson when I worked as a receptionist at a local Honda dealership. He was a car salesman, a college student, and a budding racecar driver from Ireland. His sharp clothes and accent caught my attention. He was small in stature with pale skin and a smattering of freckles you could only see close up. His dark eyes and dark curly hair made his appearance markedly different from the other boys I had been attracted to. But they had been boys, and Patrick was a man. Four years older than me, he commanded my attention in a way I found intoxicating.
When he first started talking to me at the dealership, he was shy but not hesitant. I noticed the other salesmen liked and trusted him and would toss him leads if they were busy with a customer when another potential buyer came in. Patrick was endearingly goofy. He’d start singing the Fine Young Cannibals song “She Drives Me Crazy” while he danced in this utterly silly way and pointed to me, as I sat laughing behind the reception desk. He didn’t have a cocky air about him, no hint of I’m this sexy European and you’re going to fall for me. Instead, he was self-deprecating, more apt to say, You like me? Really?
When Patrick started taking me out, he was kind and attentive, especially when I told him what was going on at home. “That’s unforgivable,” he said. “I wish your dad would try something in front of me. I’d kick his ass.” Within months we’d fallen in love. I felt safe with him.
Patrick’s student visa would be expiring soon. He didn’t want to leave the country yet, and I couldn’t imagine being without him. I was slightly apprehensive when my new love suggested marriage over a casual dinner. We could really help each other, he argued. He needed me; I needed him. I would have no one without him, and without me he’d have to go back to Ireland. When I agreed to the logic of the concept, he removed the green cocktail straw from his rum and Coke and tied it around my finger—a gesture I found romantic, if unconventional. He was kind; he was cute; he was worldly. He handled all the details, making the appointments for us to get a marriage license and be wed.
But first I had to retrieve my birth certificate. It didn’t occur to me that I could just order a copy, so I called home for the first time since leaving and told my mother I’d be coming by the Annandale house for the original.
“Carine?” Mom called from the basement office when I arrived. “Is that you? I’m down here.”
I walked down the steps, and she looked up from her desk. I assumed she would reach into one of the file cabinets for the paperwork.
“Your birth certificate is in my purse,” she said. “But you can’t have it.”
“I’m eighteen,” I replied. “It’s mine to have.”
“I don’t care how old you are,” she retorted. “I’m not giving it to you.”
I had no interest in arguing with her. I’d seen her purse on the chair next to the front door, and I knew she was baiting me, so I retraced my steps to go get it myself. I heard her a few steps behind me, so I started to run. I grabbed her purse and ran out the door, figuring I could extract the birth certificate before making it to the car, but I couldn’t find it at such a fast pace.
Patrick had been waiting in the summer heat with the engine off and the windows down. I yelled frantically, “Start the car! Start the car!”
As I jumped into the passenger seat and started rifling through Mom’s purse, she stuck her arm through the open window.
Some neighbors had seen the commotion, and Mom shouted, “My purse! They’re stealing my purse!”
“I don’t want your purse!” I shouted back. “I just want my birth certificate!”
To my surprise, Patrick put the car into drive with my mom’s arm still through the window, her hand now tightly wound around the purse strap. As he slowly drove forward, he yanked on the purse and the top of her head hit the upper window frame.
“Stop the car!” I yelled.
But Patrick just k
ept driving slowly with this determined glare, his fiery eyes vacant to what was happening. He yanked repeatedly on the purse and my mom’s head kept hitting the car.
“Stop! You’re hurting her!” I screamed at Patrick. “Stop!”
Finally he stopped the car just long enough to let my mom retrieve her purse and her arm back through the window.
We drove home in silence. I felt terrible about what had happened, and it seemed more like a bad dream than reality. A few days later, I got a call from my mom when I was at work—the only number she had for me. “Come get your birth certificate,” she said bitterly. “I don’t care what you do anymore.”
A MONTH AFTER MY BIRTHDAY ESCAPE, I married my Irishman in the living room of a Fairfax County, Virginia, justice of the peace. The nuptials were nondescript—certainly not what I had imagined as a little girl. My long white cotton dress had a wide lace-trimmed ruffle that fell softly from my bare shoulders. My Aunt Jan, one of my mom’s younger sisters, had sent the dress to me just before graduation. She didn’t intend for the gift to be a wedding dress, but it was beautiful, and after examining my meager choices, I had decided it was my best option.
As the marriage vows soaked in through my ears and fell out of my mouth, I wondered what my brother would say when he found out I’d gotten married. Everything felt too new to be so definite. I wished that it were Jimmy standing beside me. I thought about the very real possibility that I might never see my parents again. I longed for a way to rewind my life, edit the characters, and push play again. Some scenes needed less revision than others.
The Wild Truth Page 8
